Cash Cows for Online News?

Profit generation is one of the most challenging aspects of the digital news revolution. Digital media expert Rishad Tobaccowala offers some fundraising suggestions, from the conventional to the offbeat (at least for news outlets), in the May/June issue of the Columbia Journalism Review (link courtesy of IJNet.org).

Among Tobaccowala's ideas:

* Charging for select archived material (many online papers do this already)

* Selling merchandise

* Targeting Web advertising towards individual readers

Read more of Tobaccowala's suggestions (and add some of your own!) here.

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All Joking Aside....

Leave it to The Onion to capture the hilarity of the over-caffeinated news cycle that Internet Age reporters and editors often bemoan. The Onion's recent piece "Media Landscape Redefined By 24-Second News Cycle" provides a laughable take on the deadline pressures journalists face in the digital world. The lede posits that the 24-second broadcast news cycle might not actually capture the depth and nuance of the "old" 45-second stories.

Newspapers aren't safe either, The Onion notes: "While the changes have brought higher ratings and ad revenues to televised news, print newspapers have suffered greatly, due to the high cost of printing and distributing a new edition every 24 seconds."

For more laughs:
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/media_landscape_redefined_by_24

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